FANNY & ALEXANDER

About the show

Fanny and Alexander grow up in the early 20th century within the Ekdahl family, a wealthy, upper-middle-class theatrical clan. Their father is a theater director, and their mother is an actress. The children naturally take part in lavish celebrations, theater rehearsals, and conversations about literature. Their happy childhood comes to an abrupt end when their father collapses and dies during a rehearsal. The father’s ghost repeatedly appears to his grieving son. Their mother, Emilie, remarries—this time to a bishop who demands she leave behind everything familiar and all her possessions to follow him and her children into his ascetic world. There, they endure repression and violence. Despite being pregnant again, Emilie resolves to leave the bishop, who responds by threatening to strip her of custody of her biological children. The bishop loses his life in a fire at his home. Emilie, Fanny, and Alexander return to the Ekdahl family fold. The matriarch—Emilie’s mother-in-law, Helene—quotes the closing lines from August Strindberg’s A Dream Play: "Anything can happen; anything is possible and probable. Time and space do not exist." In his final feature film, released in 1982, Swedish theater and film director Ingmar Bergman adopts the perspective of Alexander, who observes the adult world—watching how people love, lie, play, and die. These subtle observations of everyday life intertwine with the profound metaphysical questions about the human condition that preoccupied Bergman throughout the body of work he reflects upon in this film. For Icelandic director Thorleifur Örn Arnarsson—himself the child of a theater family—the film is above all a declaration of love for the power of art, and specifically for the theater as a realm of imagination capable of transcending all boundaries.